“A Tragic Waste Of Time”: In The Budget Fight, The GOP Doesn’t Act In The National Interest
Are we really going to do this? Are we going to wade into a struggle we don’t really want to fight? Are we going to mire ourselves in a senseless, grinding conflict whose possible outcomes range from bad to worse?
I’m talking about the upcoming budget battles in Washington, of course. (What, you thought I meant something else?)
Incredibly, Congress seems determined to spend much of the fall demonstrating its boundless talent for dysfunction. House Republicans say they will threaten once again to send the nation into default — and the economy over a cliff — by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling, now set at $16.7 trillion. This means that by mid-October, the government would exhaust its borrowing authority and be left without enough money to pay its bills.
“The president doesn’t think this is fair, thinks I’m being difficult to deal with,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week at an Idaho fundraiser. “But I’ll say this: It may be unfair, but what I’m trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices. We’re going to have a whale of a fight.”
In other words, Boehner is looking forward to the opportunity to threaten the nation with grievous harm. Nice little economic recovery you’re working on. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.
President Obama, who has seen this movie before, says there will be no fight because he categorically refuses to negotiate over the debt ceiling. He demands that Congress do its job — which amounts to a routine bit of bookkeeping — without all the needless drama.
Investors around the world still consider U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds to be the ultimate safe haven, especially in times of economic uncertainty. It is unthinkable that our elected officials, supposedly working in the nation’s best interests, would threaten this exalted and immensely beneficial status by intentionally triggering a default.
So who’s going to blink?
Obama certainly has the stronger political position. His approval numbers may be stuck in the 40s, but ratings for Congress are down in the teens — and sinking.
Boehner has almost no room to maneuver. House Republicans are still fuming at having been forced to swallow a modest tax increase for the wealthy as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal earlier this year. The responsible thing would be for Boehner to bring a simple bill raising the debt ceiling to the floor, where it would pass with the votes of Democrats and non-crazy Republicans. But that would probably cost Boehner his job.
You’re depressed already? I’m just getting started.
Before we even get to the debt-ceiling fight, the government will run out of authority to spend money on Sept. 30 — which means no ability to function — unless Congress approves a continuing resolution. Doing so should be another no-brainer, but some Republicans are itching for a government shutdown. Because, you know, that worked so well for Newt Gingrich in the ’90s.
Boehner wants none of that. But in an attempt to get House Republicans to avert a shutdown by passing a short-term funding bill, he promises them a “whale of a fight” later over the debt ceiling. (He treats his caucus as if it were a cage full of rabid wolverines.)
Oh, and there’s another whole dimension to the pointless political snarling and bickering we will have to endure over the next few months: Obamacare.
Some Republicans believe, or say they believe, that they can use the continuing-resolution fight or the debt-ceiling fight, or maybe both, to force Obama to sign legislation nullifying all or part of his health-care reforms. One idea is to take away Obamacare’s funding. Another is to delay the individual health insurance mandate, due to take effect next year.
Do they really believe the president is willing to forsake his most important legislative accomplishment? Before it even comes fully into effect?
This is a tragic waste of time and effort, and the House Republicans are to blame. Remember when Democrats captured the House in 2006? They worked with George W. Bush even though they disagreed with his policies. Most Democrats adamantly opposed the Iraq War, but then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that Bush got the funding he required for the troops.
Boehner and his crew need to act like grown ups. If they don’t, voters need to send them home.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 2, 2013
“Doing More With Less”: Outgoing IRS Chief Blames Underfunding For ‘Foolish’ Mistakes
Testifying in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller apologized for his agency Friday.
“I want to apologize on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service for the mistakes that we made and the poor service that we provided,” Miller said. “The affected organizations and the American public deserve better.”
Agents at the IRS decided to take a shortcut in 2010 that has created an uproar, “centralizing” a number of factors that could raise suspicions that these fledgling non-profits might not be focused primarily on ”social welfare.” One of those factors — and here’s where they made their biggest mistake — was focusing on groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names. Later they revised this policy to focus on “political action-type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,” according to the IRS Inspector General’s report.
The result? Some 300 groups were identified for extra scrutiny — among them, 70 were Tea Party groups. It’s not clear how many groups were turned down, yet it’s clear at least one Democratic group was.
Miller — who is stepping down from his position at the request of the administration — insisted that the actions were not intended to target conservatives.
“I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection,” he said. “The listing described in the report, while intolerable, was a mistake, and not an act of partisanship.”
Under questioning by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Miller pointed out that though progressive groups were not identified by name, the IRS actually collected more information on left-leaning groups than Tea Party groups. The lifelong bureaucrat even rejected the notion that his agency was “targeting” anyone, insisting that was a pejorative term to describe the “listing” the agents were doing.
Republicans continually tied the scandal to attacks on the IRS in general, often citing audits by their supporters as proof of the agency’s overreach.
“The reality is this is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too powerful, too intrusive and too abusive of honest, hardworking taxpayers,” said Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI).
But Miller had another explanation for why his agents pursued such questionable practices — funding. The commissioner asked the committee to increase funding to his agency, citing budget constraints as a major reason why agents sought shortcuts to identify questionable applications.
“In the last 10 years, the budget of the IRS, adjusted for the size of the population and inflation, has come down 17 percent,” according to tax expert David Cay Johnston.
Committee members offered several examples of groups being denied 401(c)(4) status or delayed endlessly. However, there’s no evidence that suggests Republican spending was hindered by this IRS’s shortcut.
“Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative,” writes OpenSecretsblog‘ Robert Maguire. ”They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, May 17, 2013
“It’s Time For Republicans To Get Serious”: Spending Cuts In President Obama’s Budget Put Onus On Paul Ryan
When it comes to deficit reduction, President Barack Obama may have correctly taken the measure of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and U.S. corporate leaders; that’s a reason why any deficit deal is more remote than ever.
Two and a half years ago, when the president refused to embrace the recommendations of his own deficit-reduction panel, he was criticized by the authors, Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, as well as by business leaders.
The plan proposed a balance of spending reductions and tax increases of about $4 trillion over almost a decade; that would bring the long-term debt to a sustainable level, according to proponents, who said the president was abdicating leadership.
Privately, Obama saw the proposal as a trap. If he embraced it, Republicans would say, “let’s focus on areas where we agree — spending, including entitlement cuts — and return later to raising revenue.” Then, he feared, Simpson, Bowles and those worried executives would provide aid and comfort for that position, handing a devastating defeat to Democrats.
In these recurring budget battles, Obama deserves his share of blame. At the turn of the year, he was unwilling to hang tough for an entitlements-revenue deal as tax increases loomed for all Americans. He blinked and accepted a smaller tax increase on the wealthy. The White House then miscalculated that the mindless across-the-board spending cuts under sequestration were so bad that an alternative would emerge.
Yet, a month ago, Obama took a risk and proposed a budget containing cuts to entitlements cherished by his party. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, and his cohorts were unmoved; they wouldn’t give an inch on new revenue.
Simpson and Bowles gave Obama a pat on the back and largely refrained from criticizing Ryan or House Speaker John Boehner, while corporate leaders ducked.
Moreover, Simpson and Bowles have revised their plan and moved to the right, proposing proportionately more spending cuts and less in new revenue. Obama is playing ball, Ryan isn’t, and the two deficit hawks, and their CEO supporters, are rewarding the guy who is stiffing them.
Simpson and Bowles have been admirably persistent, open to some modifications and correctly insistent on the need to curb long-term health-care costs. A spokesman offered this explanation for their latest move to the right: Republicans now control the House. Sorry, Republicans had just won a huge victory, taking control of the House, and were on a high when Bowles-Simpson was first offered in December 2010.
What’s really going on is that their fervent hope for a deal rests on a naïve assumption that the able Ryan will strike a responsible compromise, even though he has made clear that he won’t.
The Republican position is that taxes went up as part of the deal on the so-called fiscal cliff, and there will be no more increases. In reality, all the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush were slated to expire anyway, and Republican congressional leaders, their backs against the wall, had to accept some higher levies on the wealthy.
Moreover, that $600 billion, over a decade, is only a little more than half of what Bowles-Simpson proposed. In addition, the new revenue is dwarfed by spending cuts, which have been more than twice as large.
Obama, for all his earlier timidity, showed political guts with his budget last month. He would lower cost-of-living adjustments for most Social Security recipients, means-test Medicare benefits for wealthier senior citizens and enact other reforms to entitlements that would amount to about as much as the deficit commission recommended.
This has infuriated the Democratic base, some of whom, unreasonably, oppose any cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Others warned that, whatever the merits, there was a political risk to a unilateral gesture, which would be rejected by the Republicans and rob the Democrats of a good issue.
So far, that’s proven to be the case.
Other Republican criticisms are equally dubious. The charge that Obama doesn’t deal with long-term health-care spending would be more credible if a stronger alternative were on the table. Obama’s Medicare cutbacks, over 20 years, are larger than Ryan’s. The sequestration cuts, now accepted by many Republicans, as the White House notes, provide no permanent entitlement changes. None.
There’s also sniping that the entitlement changes would be phased in only gradually. Well, that’s the only way to make entitlement changes politically viable. Consider the much-praised 1983 commission led by future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that made Social Security more solvent with spending cuts and higher taxes. It takes full effect in 2022, almost 40 years after it was enacted.
Corporate executives say they’re pessimistic about any long-term deficit changes and thus it’s better not to rock the boat. Who’s abdicating now?
Senate Democrats, after legitimate criticism for failing to pass a budget for years, did so this year. Now, it’s Ryan and the House Republicans who refuse to go to a conference to try to reconcile differences.
In Washington, there’s a propensity to find bipartisan fault in most conflicts. Often, that is on the mark.
Now, however, if Simpson and Bowles and the CEOs who warned about the dire need to get America’s fiscal house in order are serious, they have a clear target: Paul Ryan.
By: Albert R. Hunt, The National Memo, May 16, 2013
“Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion: Republicans Taking The Politics Of Extortion Past The Breaking Point
With the House and Senate both having passed budget resolutions, the next step in the process should be a conference committee, which Republican leaders said they wanted. Recently, however, they changed their mind and now refuse to allow the process to proceed.
Why? I’ve worked under the assumption this is the result of GOP lawmakers feeling apprehension about their unpopular ideas and fearing a public backlash. But the Washington Post reports there may be a little more to it.
[The shrinking deficit] might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break. Instead, the fiscal fight appears certain to bleed into the fall, when policymakers will face another multi-pronged crisis that pairs the need for a higher debt limit and the fresh risk of default with the threat of a full-scale government shutdown, which is also looming Oct. 1.
In the meantime, Republicans face a listless summer, with little appetite for compromise but no leverage to shape an agreement. Without that leverage, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday, there is no point in opening formal budget negotiations between the House and the Senate, because Democrats have no reason to consider the kind of far-reaching changes to Medicare and the U.S. tax code that Republicans see as fundamental building blocks of a deal.
“The debt limit is the backstop,” Ryan said before taking the stage at a debt summit organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in Washington.
I realize talking about budgets, conference committees, and debt ceilings is dry. This no doubt strikes some readers as inside baseball, of little interest to anyone other than political junkies and wonks.
But I hope folks will take a moment to consider what Ryan and his colleagues are saying here. They’re admitting, publicly and without shame, that they can’t engage in budget negotiations unless they can also threaten to deliberately crash the economy. GOP lawmakers want a “backstop” that will give them “leverage” in talks — whereas the conference committee is ostensibly about finding a bipartisan, bicameral compromise, Republicans need the possibility of a brutal self-inflicted crisis to hang over the process.
And if they can’t have it, they won’t engage in the budget process at all.
Wait, it gets worse.
Congressional Republicans made a series of assumptions, all of which have turned out to be wrong. They assumed Senate Democrats couldn’t pass a budget. They assumed Democrats wouldn’t want a budget process considered under regular order. And they assumed the budget talks, if they occurred, would happen around the same time as the need for a debt-ceiling increase.
GOP lawmakers were terribly disappointed, then, to see Senate Democrats do exactly what they were asked to do, and the economy improved quickly enough to push off the debt-limit deadline until fall.
But with their plans foiled, Republicans are stuck with no Plan B, no leverage, and no credible threat. Consider how remarkable this is:
[S]enior Senate Republicans, including several who recently dined with Obama and huddled with administration officials, conceded that it may be tough to bring their colleagues to the table too far ahead of the debt-ceiling deadline.
“I think there’s a better atmosphere for a solution than there’s been in the past, but I’m a little worried about people here in the Senate having fiscal fatigue. There isn’t any sense of urgency right now,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), one of three senators who joined Obama on Monday for a round of golf.
“We need to realize this debt ceiling is out there. It’s inevitable. It’s coming. And [the later deadline] should not relieve pressure,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. But “sometimes we don’t want to act until a gun is at our heads.”
Think about that for a second. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee is willing to admit — out loud and on the record — that there can’t be a budget process unless he and his Republican colleagues can threaten to trash the full faith and credit of the United States on purpose.
And here’s the kicker: Republicans aren’t even asking for anything specific yet. They know they want to hold the nation hostage, but they’re not sure why, and haven’t figured out what their demands are. Jonathan Bernstein argued persuasively yesterday that we’re looking at “extortion for the sake of extortion.”
The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It’s the extortion that’s the point. Not the policy.
I’ve run out of adjectives to describe how crazy this is, but I’ll just conclude with this: those pundits who assume Republicans are a mainstream political party, and it’s a mystery as to why President Obama hasn’t had more success negotiating with these folks, just aren’t paying close enough attention.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2013
“Republicans Are Out Of Excuses”: President Obama’s Budget And The Put-Up-Or-Shut-Up Challenge
As promised, President Obama sent Congress his budget for the 2014 fiscal year this morning, and there’s just enough in it to make everyone unhappy from a variety of directions.
Republicans won’t like everything about this plan that makes it progressive: it expands Medicaid, undoes sequestration cuts while ignoring Paul Ryan’s demands to slash public investments, pursues a universal-preschool initiative though new tobacco taxes, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit, invests another $50 billion in job-creating infrastructure, gives a big boost to federal R&D, and takes away breaks for Big Oil.
Democrats won’t like everything about this plan that makes it conservative: it includes additional Medicare reforms, it adopts chained-CPI to lower Social Security benefits, and it focuses more on the spending side of the ledger than the revenue side. On a fundamental level, Obama’s budget starts in the middle, rather than the left, making negotiations that much more difficult.
But whichever side you fall on, there’s an underlying strategy here. Ezra Klein’s summary sounds right to me:
Today’s budget is the White House’s effort to reach the bedrock of the fiscal debate. Half of its purpose is showing what they’re willing to do. They want a budget compromise, and this budget proves it. There are now liberals protesting on the White House lawn. But the other half is revealing what the GOP is — or, more to the point, isn’t — willing to do. Republicans don’t want a budget compromise, and this budget is likely to prove that, too.
As the White House sees it, there are two possible outcomes to this budget. One is that it actually leads to a grand bargain, either now or in a couple of months. Another is that it proves to the press and the public that Republican intransigence is what’s standing in the way of a grand bargain.
So, which of these two outcomes is more likely?
I think the smart money is on the latter. The president has called every GOP bluff and put his cards on the table — Republicans said Obama wouldn’t have the guts to go after entitlements and isn’t tough enough to risk the ire of his base. And now we know these assumptions were wrong — the president has presented a White House budget that includes the very entitlement “reforms” GOP leaders asked for, and liberals are furious.
It is, in other words, “put up or shut up” time. Republicans, out of excuses, can either meet Obama half-way or they’ll be exposed as craven. And if the last several years are any indication, GOP lawmakers will chose the latter without a moment’s thought.
Indeed, as Greg Sargent noted, congressional Republican leaders have already spent the afternoon arguing that Obama should simply give the GOP what it wants, and abandon the Democratic priorities, reinforcing the perception that Republicans still do not yet understand the difference between an offer and a gift.
In fact, I should mention that I received an email the other day from a long-time reader asking why I don’t seem more worked up about chained-CPI. The reader asked whether I support it (I don’t) and whether I’ve been relatively quiet about it out of some ideological or partisan predisposition.
I’ll tell you what I told him: I’m not worked up about it because I don’t see the scenario in which Republicans get chained-CPI by giving Obama hundreds of billions of new revenue. It’s easy to remain detached about a bad idea that seems highly unlikely to go anywhere. As Kevin Drum added today, “I don’t doubt that Obama’s offer is sincere, but it doesn’t matter. Republicans aren’t going to take it. Obama will get his proof that Republicans simply aren’t willing to negotiate seriously, and who knows? Maybe it will do him some good. But that’s all he’ll get.”
For me, the more interesting question is how the political world will process these developments when they occur. The Beltway said Obama needed to reach out to Republicans, so he reached out to Republicans. The Beltway said Obama needed to schmooze Republicans in a more personal way, so he did that, too. The Beltway said Obama needed to be willing to alienate his own supporters, and the president’s base has been duly outraged. The Beltway said Obama needed to put Medicare and Social Security on the table, and they’re on the table.
Will pundits who continue to blame “both sides” for partisan gridlock look ridiculous in the coming months? I sure as hell hope so.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2013
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